Constructional Compositionality and the English Resultative

Recent work on grammatical constructions in English (Lakoff 1987, Goldberg 1995, Kay & Fillmore 1999, Fillmore, Kay & O’Connor 1988) has provided strong evidence that the meaning of an utterance is not always derivable from its lexical parts and that the semantics of a sentence is partly comprised of meaning ascribed to syntactic constructions. Lacking in most of these accounts, however, is a detailed description of how the syntactic and semantic constraints of different constructions can combine together and result in the appropriate syntactic forms and semantic interpretations. The aim of this paper is to take, as a starting point, the form and meaning of the resultative construction and examine how it can be combined with the set of constructions known in the transformational literature as raising constructions, such as it-clefts and topicalization. The grammaticality of topicalized resultative phrases reveals that the resultative construction consists of a number of different, related, sub-constructions, each with its own semantic and syntactic properties. A cognitively grounded radial structure for the resultative is advanced based on the different form and meaning constraints of the sub-constructions. Generation of the appropriate sentence forms for a topicalized resultative also requires precisely defining a theory of CONSTRUCTIONAL COMPOSITIONALITY, or how multiple constructions can combine to create a new construction. To do so, a distinction is drawn between constructions that are composed ad hoc and those that are related to other constructions but specifically enumerated in the grammar. This cline is discussed with respect to topicalized resultatives, which, because of certain idiosyncratic properties, must be explicitly enumerated in the grammar and is not composed ad-hoc.